It's not quite a conviction, more of a nagging suspicion, that I get each time I'm faced with the task of writing a new piece: it's finally happened, the jig's up, you've altogether run out of ideas. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.
There are plenty of historical examples of composers who actually did "run out of ideas". Aaron Copland spent his last two decades conducting his own previous works; Charles Ives was stymied working on his wildly impracticable Universe Symphony, falling silent for the following 35 years; around the same time, Sibelius's inability to complete an eighth symphony cast the last 30 years of his life into self-destructive depression. The pop world can be even harsher; there's a kind of critical glee when an artist fails to live up to the creative promise of their 20's.
There's something about being a composer which feels slightly fraudulent. It's a far less promethean occupation than the "composer" of popular consciousness. Writing music is more like refashioning something which already existed, and had always existed. It's making a sufficiently unrecognizable collage out of other people's materials. Adding to this perception is the fact that it can be so much fun (people pay me to do this?) and that much of the process doesn't feel like "work" in the traditional sense, at least not how I do it.
This week's "work" is starting a new piece for solo piano. Again, by all appearances, I am not exactly working, but instead playing through Chopin's third Scherzo rather badly. I am enjoying myself immensely. Sight-reading, as opposed to goal-oriented practice, is very freeing. You don't have to stop and sort out all the little technical problems of learning a piece. Instead you just revel in its particular world, enjoy the sounds of the piano, the blocky chords, and the approximated arpeggios. In the moment, you manage to convince yourself of the brilliance of your own seat-of-the-pants interpretation—yes, that's how Chopin meant for it to be played!—even though you've put in no careful thought and consideration, only tried one of a thousand possibilities.
In the Chopin Scherzo, my "revelation" is to take absolutely no liberties with the tempo—I'm playing every rhythm exactly as notated. This is the kind of extremist approach that may eventually be useful, but in its unadulterated form sounds more like a stubborn bulldozer.
Still, the bulldozer approach has some merit—particularly in the middle section, where that beautiful block chord chorale alternates with fantastic-sounding descending arpeggios from the top of the keyboard. Understandably, most pianists I've heard take their time here; it's a deeply expressive passage, full of satisfying harmonic shifts and suspensions (little held-over notes which, when added to an unsuspecting chord, make it sound even better—like harmonic salt).
The disadvantage of all this swooning is that one loses the sense of forward momentum. It's just chords and arpeggios randomly situated in time, rather than a long melody stretched over a harmonic progression leading to an inevitable conclusion. Some rhythmic discipline seems to be in order.
What is it about those arpeggios that sound so good?—better than a normal arpeggio, which is just a chord with its notes played one after another, rather than at the same time. These have a real tune embedded within them, one that you can sing (sort of) and which leads the listener down the keyboard in an inexorable sequence. I start fooling around with the figure, leading even further, down to the muddiest depths of the piano, making it modulate and start again, even overlap with other occurrences of itself, in different keys and at different rates. There might be something there, I think to myself. I often get ideas this way, making the jump from the interpretive (pianist) to the creative (composer) side of me.
I've become interested lately in embedding harmonic change in the actual musical material, instead of simply imposing change onto existing material—constant change becoming a foundation on which the music develops. Absent-mindedly butchering a bit of Chopin may have showed me a way to apply this abstraction to my new piano piece.
My New Piano Piece starts with a big section based on the skeletal melody I extracted from Chopin. I've arranged it to start at opposite ends of the keyboard, the two hands moving toward each other at the center. When they meet, they keep going
downward—but the melody also starts again at both ends, displaced by half a beat, necessitating flying leaps in both hands in order to play both things at once. These individual entrances—a canon of sorts—build up momentum, volume, and harmonic density, and things start to go a bit haywire.
New canonic entrances start to appear where they shouldn't, certain lines accelerate wildly, and before long it's a black snarl of notes, octaves, and arpeggios moving up and down the keyboard all at once, crossing each other and starting again. This may be the most difficult and outwardly virtuosic thing I've written in quite awhile.
Through this first section, the rising left hand notes gradually morph into their own new idea—a cycle built from five-note groups, which is like a machine for changing keys, constantly doubling back on itself, rising and falling unpredictably but always in strict rhythm. Before too long, these quintuplets are the only thing going, first loud and brilliant, rising to the very top of the keyboard, then mirrored by a soft and gentle response.
The quintuplets wind down, leaving the music open and rather spare. A new version of theo pening melody is played very high, but it has a new character, also inciting harmonic change. It sounds a bit fugal now, like a piece of Bach-ian counterpoint—which in fact, it is, though the following section sounds quite unlike Bach.
It owes more of a debt to the music of Conlon Nancarrow, who wrote intensely complex contrapuntal pieces for his own modified player-pianos. His canonic voices move at different speeds, and wander all over the keyboard, seemingly independent of each other, but in fact fitting together in a precisely calculated way.
My Nancarrow section is not quite as complex—it's going to be played by a human being, remember—but it has the same quality of stumbling back, lurching forward, and not quite settlinginto a followable rhythmic groove. Eventually the voices do come together, though, and the music becomes more of a straight chorale—that is, independent voices moving in harmonic and rhythmic unity. It's still a fugue, actually, though each new appearance of the subject finds it slightly different, as well as transposed by a half-step.
After winding itself up and becoming quite loud, the fugue trails off slowly, overtaken by an almost
There is an almost-referential quality to this music, as though it could be from a 19th-century waltz—expect that it's not formed into predictable units of eight and sixteen bars, instead wandering slowly down the keyboard, growing hazy in a wash of
This trade-off between the high, waltzy music and lullaby-like sequence (a rhythm which repeats while modulating). There is an almost-referential quality to this music, as though it could be from a 19th-century waltz—except that it's not formed into predictable units of eight and sixteen bars, instead wandering slowly down the keyboard, growing hazy in a wash of grace-notes in different keys.
The sequence is answered by short, upward-moving chorales low in the bass, hinting at a similar theme in the Chopin scherzo. This trade-off between the high, waltzy music and the low chorale continues for several more iterations, each time building to a slightly louder dynamic and a more urgent harmony. It all builds to a rather brash statement of Chopin's original chorale (with a few extra notes added).
If this has all sounded quite relentless so far—each new section escalating, building, getting louder and faster and more complicated—that's quite true. It's a relentless kind of piece, both in its treatment of musical material and in the challenges it presents to the pianist. This is a bit uncharacteristic.
Much of my favorite music, especially recent music, is minimal, static, repetitive, completely lacking in baroque, developmental drama. I love writing like that, too, but lately my compositional mood’s been restless, not content to let a piece simply sit and revel in its own sound. I'm not sure why this is, but it doesn't particularly alarm me. Sometimes I feel more like an interested observer, eager to find out new things from my music, and to be led to them.
There are plenty of historical examples of composers who actually did "run out of ideas". Aaron Copland spent his last two decades conducting his own previous works; Charles Ives was stymied working on his wildly impracticable Universe Symphony, falling silent for the following 35 years; around the same time, Sibelius's inability to complete an eighth symphony cast the last 30 years of his life into self-destructive depression. The pop world can be even harsher; there's a kind of critical glee when an artist fails to live up to the creative promise of their 20's.
There's something about being a composer which feels slightly fraudulent. It's a far less promethean occupation than the "composer" of popular consciousness. Writing music is more like refashioning something which already existed, and had always existed. It's making a sufficiently unrecognizable collage out of other people's materials. Adding to this perception is the fact that it can be so much fun (people pay me to do this?) and that much of the process doesn't feel like "work" in the traditional sense, at least not how I do it.
This week's "work" is starting a new piece for solo piano. Again, by all appearances, I am not exactly working, but instead playing through Chopin's third Scherzo rather badly. I am enjoying myself immensely. Sight-reading, as opposed to goal-oriented practice, is very freeing. You don't have to stop and sort out all the little technical problems of learning a piece. Instead you just revel in its particular world, enjoy the sounds of the piano, the blocky chords, and the approximated arpeggios. In the moment, you manage to convince yourself of the brilliance of your own seat-of-the-pants interpretation—yes, that's how Chopin meant for it to be played!—even though you've put in no careful thought and consideration, only tried one of a thousand possibilities.
In the Chopin Scherzo, my "revelation" is to take absolutely no liberties with the tempo—I'm playing every rhythm exactly as notated. This is the kind of extremist approach that may eventually be useful, but in its unadulterated form sounds more like a stubborn bulldozer.
Still, the bulldozer approach has some merit—particularly in the middle section, where that beautiful block chord chorale alternates with fantastic-sounding descending arpeggios from the top of the keyboard. Understandably, most pianists I've heard take their time here; it's a deeply expressive passage, full of satisfying harmonic shifts and suspensions (little held-over notes which, when added to an unsuspecting chord, make it sound even better—like harmonic salt).
The disadvantage of all this swooning is that one loses the sense of forward momentum. It's just chords and arpeggios randomly situated in time, rather than a long melody stretched over a harmonic progression leading to an inevitable conclusion. Some rhythmic discipline seems to be in order.
What is it about those arpeggios that sound so good?—better than a normal arpeggio, which is just a chord with its notes played one after another, rather than at the same time. These have a real tune embedded within them, one that you can sing (sort of) and which leads the listener down the keyboard in an inexorable sequence. I start fooling around with the figure, leading even further, down to the muddiest depths of the piano, making it modulate and start again, even overlap with other occurrences of itself, in different keys and at different rates. There might be something there, I think to myself. I often get ideas this way, making the jump from the interpretive (pianist) to the creative (composer) side of me.
I've become interested lately in embedding harmonic change in the actual musical material, instead of simply imposing change onto existing material—constant change becoming a foundation on which the music develops. Absent-mindedly butchering a bit of Chopin may have showed me a way to apply this abstraction to my new piano piece.
My New Piano Piece starts with a big section based on the skeletal melody I extracted from Chopin. I've arranged it to start at opposite ends of the keyboard, the two hands moving toward each other at the center. When they meet, they keep going
downward—but the melody also starts again at both ends, displaced by half a beat, necessitating flying leaps in both hands in order to play both things at once. These individual entrances—a canon of sorts—build up momentum, volume, and harmonic density, and things start to go a bit haywire.
New canonic entrances start to appear where they shouldn't, certain lines accelerate wildly, and before long it's a black snarl of notes, octaves, and arpeggios moving up and down the keyboard all at once, crossing each other and starting again. This may be the most difficult and outwardly virtuosic thing I've written in quite awhile.
Through this first section, the rising left hand notes gradually morph into their own new idea—a cycle built from five-note groups, which is like a machine for changing keys, constantly doubling back on itself, rising and falling unpredictably but always in strict rhythm. Before too long, these quintuplets are the only thing going, first loud and brilliant, rising to the very top of the keyboard, then mirrored by a soft and gentle response.
The quintuplets wind down, leaving the music open and rather spare. A new version of theo pening melody is played very high, but it has a new character, also inciting harmonic change. It sounds a bit fugal now, like a piece of Bach-ian counterpoint—which in fact, it is, though the following section sounds quite unlike Bach.
It owes more of a debt to the music of Conlon Nancarrow, who wrote intensely complex contrapuntal pieces for his own modified player-pianos. His canonic voices move at different speeds, and wander all over the keyboard, seemingly independent of each other, but in fact fitting together in a precisely calculated way.
My Nancarrow section is not quite as complex—it's going to be played by a human being, remember—but it has the same quality of stumbling back, lurching forward, and not quite settlinginto a followable rhythmic groove. Eventually the voices do come together, though, and the music becomes more of a straight chorale—that is, independent voices moving in harmonic and rhythmic unity. It's still a fugue, actually, though each new appearance of the subject finds it slightly different, as well as transposed by a half-step.
After winding itself up and becoming quite loud, the fugue trails off slowly, overtaken by an almost
There is an almost-referential quality to this music, as though it could be from a 19th-century waltz—expect that it's not formed into predictable units of eight and sixteen bars, instead wandering slowly down the keyboard, growing hazy in a wash of
This trade-off between the high, waltzy music and lullaby-like sequence (a rhythm which repeats while modulating). There is an almost-referential quality to this music, as though it could be from a 19th-century waltz—except that it's not formed into predictable units of eight and sixteen bars, instead wandering slowly down the keyboard, growing hazy in a wash of grace-notes in different keys.
The sequence is answered by short, upward-moving chorales low in the bass, hinting at a similar theme in the Chopin scherzo. This trade-off between the high, waltzy music and the low chorale continues for several more iterations, each time building to a slightly louder dynamic and a more urgent harmony. It all builds to a rather brash statement of Chopin's original chorale (with a few extra notes added).
If this has all sounded quite relentless so far—each new section escalating, building, getting louder and faster and more complicated—that's quite true. It's a relentless kind of piece, both in its treatment of musical material and in the challenges it presents to the pianist. This is a bit uncharacteristic.
Much of my favorite music, especially recent music, is minimal, static, repetitive, completely lacking in baroque, developmental drama. I love writing like that, too, but lately my compositional mood’s been restless, not content to let a piece simply sit and revel in its own sound. I'm not sure why this is, but it doesn't particularly alarm me. Sometimes I feel more like an interested observer, eager to find out new things from my music, and to be led to them.
***
Timo Andres grew up in Connecticut and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. He performs widely, focusing on the music of his contemporaries. He earned a bachelors and a masters degree from Yale University. His debut album, Shy and Mighty, is ten interrelated pieces for piano, performed in tandem with David Kaplan on second Piano. His recent compositional works include commissions by the Carnegie Hall Ensemble, Gabriel Kahane, the Metropolis Ensemble, and the New World Symphony.